Patreon and Instagram

Hello~

I just wanted to quickly come on here to ask you about your opinions and feelings about Patreon content being posted on Instagram.

As some of you might've noticed, I post a story each time I upload a NSFW post here on Patreon, but the last few times I had to censor them heavily to

a) ensure they're still SFW
b) not giving away too much of the image

Many other artists post cropped or censored versions of their art to Instagram and I might want to do the same.


Let's be super transparent and honest here:
I am thinking about rearranging Tiers and their prices in the future. There are some problems with Patreon I need to figure out myself and see how I feel about it.

I think the main issue is, that I see Patreon more of a business than a "I want to support you" kind of thing. But that's only because you literally pay me. I don't feel good taking money and not sticking to the things I promise, maybe that's the reason why I like to communicate with you so much.
Before I started my own Patreon, I subscribed to some other artists in the same niche to see what content they are posting, how much and in what quality and to be completely honest I was disappointed with most of them. It's beyond me how they could take money and not deliver.
I really do not want to gate keep or trash talk people, but I was literally shocked and thought to myself that I would do differently.
Having a Patreon is no different than e.g selling prints. At the end of the day you should have the product you paid for.

What's even the point of my Patreon?
I created Patreon mainly to protect my art and further explore spicy content (and I obviously could never upload the stuff on IG), though, so I am in a constant conflict of "I want to make people happy" and "I don't want to devalue my art".

I am proud of the things I create, but it's still sad that some people never get to see some of the work I do, even though they really would want to. With Patreon, I never wanted to hide behind a paywall, but give people the opportunity to get bonus sadhoot - if that makes sense?

Art isn't a necessity, but a luxury and I will not offer my art for dumping prices, just to get a few bucks out of it. But maybe if I could tweak the prices and content just a little and make parts of my work public, I would solve a few of my problems.
It would make my art accessible to more people while still keep the value of my art. Well, that's the theory at least.

I mean, I created my Patreon just this year, so it's natural that I need to figure out some stuff along the way and that's one of it I guess.

What do I mean by "protecting" and "devaluing" art?
Maybe some of you saw it at the time, but I was really discouraged about some instances of people using my art, not crediting me and even insulting me. I know, it's not the people that truly enjoy my art that act up like that. The more difficult it was for me to restrict it for the people that support me. But I wasn't feeling safe anymore and it had really beaten down on me. I needed to figure out a price that would be high enough to deter "bad" people and low enough to make it affordable for people that enjoy it.

The thing with the paid (exclusive) content is though, that I explicitly make room in my life to work on content for you, to keep up with my standards regarding paid services I mentioned earlier. If we would calculate my art on a hourly pay, or even my commission pricing, each post would be worth hundreds of dollars. Of course I do not expect receiving this value for a post, but I get a bad taste in my mouth just remembering people throwing around my art like that with this knowledge.

That's why I needed to find a middle ground for me personally to keep on posting art at all and I kinda did with Patreon!

What makes me think that posting on IG would make a difference?
Posting cropped parts of my exclusive content would give people still a chance to enjoy my content.
Also, it would serve as a kind of advertisement. My IG is mostly SFW and I can't blame people not reaching out for my Patreon, if they're not familiar with my work. If they don't know what I am doing here, they won't bother to take a look in the first place!
Simple math: more people paying for the same work = decrease in price overall
I am not here to make a huge profit but I want to keep the art in a closed community and still keep it's threshold value.
Of course, this isn't a guarantee that any of this would help, but I guess it's worth a try?

Why do I even ask you?
As I said earlier, I see my Patrons as more of my customers. I like to ask about your opinion for stuff that affects you, because I would expect the same if I were you. I'd like to have another insight, just to make sure it's not something impulsive I am about to do. I would still need to figure out how I would present it on IG, since it should show enough to get an idea but still be discrete enough to still qualify as exclusive - and not all artworks would even be suitable for this.
I am really grateful that people are appreciating my art so much, that they want to support me. I said somewhere in my Patreon Bio, that making a living off my art would be the ultimate dream - so I appreciate each cent that goes toward that!


TL;DR
I want to make my exclusive NSFW art public by posting cropped parts (not full images that are censored!) to my IG to give people the opportunity to enjoy my art and to attract more Patrons to ultimately decrease the overall price of my Tiers in the future.

I am looking forward to some of your comments and messages!